Anfillo is a Northern Omotic

Omotic languages

The Omotic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages, the Roman alphabet for some others. They are fairly agglutinative, and have complex tonal systems .-Language list:The North and South Omotic...

 language spoken in western Ethiopia

Ethiopia

Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

 by a few hundred people. The term Anfillo is used to refer both to the language and the people found in a small community in the Anfillo

Anfillo (woreda)

Anfillo is one of the 180 woredas in the Oromia Region of Ethiopia. Part of the Mirab Welega Zone, Anfillo is bordered on the southwest by the Gambela Region, on the north by Jimma Gidami, on the northeast by Hawa Welele, and on the east by Sayo. The major town in Anfillo is Mugi.Coffee is an...

 woreda

Woreda

Woreda is an administrative division of Ethiopia , equivalent to a district . Woredas are composed of a number of Kebele, or neighborhood associations, which are the smallest unit of local government in Ethiopia...

, part of the Mirab Welega Zone

Mirab Welega Zone

Mirab Welega is one of the 12 Zones in the Ethiopian Region of Oromia. This zone is named after the former province of Welega, whose western part lay in the area Mirab Misraq now occupies....

. The language is on the verge of extinction as it is spoken only by adults above the age of sixty. All younger generations have shifted to Western Oromo.

Anfillo has five vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

s and about 22 consonant

Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...

s. Long vowels and consonants do occur and may have phonemic value. The basic word order is subject–object–verb. Nouns follow their modifier. Verbs are inflected for tense

Grammatical tense

A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...

, aspect and mood. Three tenses are marked morphologically: present, past, and future. Gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

 and number

Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....

are expressed lexically.

External links

• "Map of the Anfillo language", LL-MAP website